Posts Tagged ‘John Bradford’

Growing up, I used to enjoy reading S. Weissman’s Little Midrash Says (published 1986) and carefully studying Siegmund Forst’s illustrations of the weekly Torah portion. At the time, I had no idea how many of Forst’s drawings were derived from earlier traditions of biblical illustration (many of them Christian), but I was particularly struck by the moral readability of the narratives. It was always a cinch to figure out who was a good character and who was evil; you could read it on their faces. The heroes were always smiling widely and the villains looked ugly and angry at the world.

Unsurprisingly, this technique of revealing characters’ true colors (or their perceived characteristics) in their faces, which seems to be more of a Hellenistic than a Jewish approach, dates much further back than the 1980s. Medieval anti-Semitic illuminated manuscripts often depicted Jews with hooked noses, hunched backs and ugly faces and there are indications that ancient theatrical masks similarly exaggerated characters’ features. It makes sense to apply artistic license in instances like these, just as many movies today cast the hero in white and the villain in dark clothes.

Moses’ 12 spies, who surface in this week’s Torah portion of Sh’lach as the Israelites’ scouts to the Holy Land, can be viewed, if not as evil, then at the very least as having questionable motives (with the exception of Caleb and Joshua). Their denouncement of Canaan as “a land that consumes its inhabitants” (Numbers 13:32) and their subsequent campaign to convince the Israelites to pine for their time in Egypt led to a punishment of 40 years of wandering in the desert.

Artists have pasted the spies’ evil designs on their faces. In a late 15th-century Flemish book of hours, attributed to the so-called Master of the Prayer Book of Maximilian, the two spies, who wear pointed hats, carry a very large cluster of grapes on a rod, per Numbers 13:23. Like the verse says, it takes two spies to carry the branch and the attached cluster of grapes, though the artist neglects to depict the other fruits mentioned in the verse: pomegranates and figs.

Rather than depicting the grape cluster (no doubt evoking the spies’ intoxication with their fear of the Canaanite giants) tied to the pole, the Flemish master shows the rod slid between two branches of the cluster, held in place by gravity. The cluster is about half as tall as the spies and slightly wider than they. The spy in front wears a goofy expression while the second spy, whose face is covered by his hat (hinting at his blindness), is even more the dunce.

At the spies’ feet, and climbing up the branches around them, are several snails. Although it is possible that the artist has misinterpreted Numbers 13:33, where the spies speculate that they appeared like “grasshoppers” to the Canaanite giants, it is hard to imagine the artist confusing grasshoppers and snails, given the appearance of the word “chagav” in other contexts like 2Chronicles 7:13, where it clearly refers to some kind of locust.

In “Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art,” Michael Camille cites a paper by Lilian Randall, titled “The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare” [Speculum, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Jul., 1962), pp. 358-367], which argues that snails have been viewed by scholars in a variety of ways. The 19th-century critic Champfleury saw them as “agricultural pests,” while a Flemish historian of caricature saw snails safe inside their shells as “a satire on the powerful who in their fortified castles laughed at the threat of the poor whom they exploited.” Randall goes one step further and identifies snails with the cowardice of the Lombards, a Germanic people, whom Camille notes, “not only bore the stigma of being turncoats but who, along with the Jews, were Europe’s bankers.” Not only are Moses’ spies evil on account of their immature facial expressions and dunce caps; they are also surrounded by symbols of cowardice.

Detail of Nicolas Poussin’s “Autumn, or The Bunch of Grapes of the Promised Land.”

1600-1664. 117 x 160 cm. Louvre.

In the 16th-century Swiss painter Tobias Stimmer’s woodcut “The Spies Bring Back the Cluster of Grapes from the Land of Canaan,” the spies look particular ugly and fierce, as they do in Jost Amman’s woodcut by the same name. Stimmer’s work has the notable distinction of featuring other spies, carrying backpacks, in the background.

All of the dozens of medieval prints and illuminations I studied show the spies carrying just the grapes, with the exception of the c. 1450 colored pen drawing, “Spies return from Canaan carrying a large bunch of grapes,” by the anonymous illustrator of Speculum humanae salvationis, in which the spies carry another food which resembles an acorn but is probably a fig.

Many works (like Michiel van der Borch’s 1332 “The Spies return with the grapes”) show poorly formed grapes, and many of the clusters look more like bunches of bananas. Several of the figures are visibly weighed down by the grapes, as in a 1478 woodcut, “The Spies Returning from Canaan,” perhaps a reference to Christian identification of the grapes on the rod with Jesus. If that is what Christian artists truly had in mind, it makes sense that they would have depicted the Jewish pole bearers in a negative light and often with walking sticks, evoking the Wandering Jew. (Though it is worth noting later artists like Poussin used the scene to depict a secular theme – autumn – rather than a sacred one. Richard McBee has written brilliantly on this image in “Poussin’s Bible,” The Jewish Press, April 30, 2008.)

One of the earliest possible depictions of the scene is a frieze in the west façade at the Gothic Cathedral of St. Etienne (c. 1270-1280, France), which shows spies in a vineyard, perhaps Moses’ spies, as two appear to carry a basket of grapes between them. But the scene has often been confused or mislabeled, as in a gothic stained glass “redemption window” from an early 13th-century church (with 20th century restoration) in Canterbury, Kent, which shows two spies with grapes mistitled “Joshua’s Spies in Canaan (the Grapes of Eschol).”

John Bradford. “Return of the Spies.”

Contemporary depictions of the spies, of which works by Archie Rand, John Bradford and Richard McBee are foremost – although there is a miniature rendition of the spies in the bottom right corner of Chagall’s tapestry “The Entry into Jerusalem,” 1963-1964 – show a very different scene.

Rand’s work, which has one of the spies say (via cartoon bubble), “We got to the land you sent us to. And yea, it’s really flowing with milk and honey – you can see from the fruit,” is compositionally similar (if flipped 180 degrees) to Pieter Bruegel’s “The Hunters in the Snow.” The Canaan Rand’s figures emerge from is rendered with bold strokes and a colorful palette, as the spies head down toward a more dreary place. Their sin seems to stem from inability to explain a world of dramatic aesthetics to denizens of the desert doldrums.

Bradford’s spies, like Moses and the rest of the Israelites, are nearly indistinguishable from the landscape and it is difficult to identify where walking sticks end and trees begin. If their sin was speaking ill of the land of Canaan, they were spreading lies about themselves as well, so embedded are they in the landscape.

But if Rand and Bradford focus more on the landscape that surrounds the figures, as Poussin does but in sharp contrast to the medieval depictions which portrayed the figures alone, McBee focuses on the spies making their pitch to the Israelites. One can see sheer terror on the faces of the spies’ audience members, who fear for their lives and their families’ safety. Where many of his predecessors focused on the spies’ psychology and immorality, McBee is far more interested in the bystanders who receive their dark message. In so doing, McBee has broadened the scope from the Classical (and individualized) heroes and villains to the larger mass of people, which of course, includes us all as well.

Menachem Wecker, who blogs on faith and art for the Houston Chronicle at http://blogs.chron.com/iconia, welcomes comments at mwecker@gmail.com.

Member Exhibition: John Bradford

Recent Work: Biblical Subjects

Hung April 24 – May 19, 2007

55 Mercer Gallery, 55 Mercer Street, New York

Some painters enslave themselves to detailed landscapes, patiently tracking every tree branch and grass blade in an effort to transcribe and document everything. As “naturalists,” these artists abide by a modern derivation of Plato’s notion of ideal art: painted grapes so real that they fool the birds into trying to consume them. There is desperation in this body of work, and viewers get the sense that the artists, fearing that reality will soon disappear, half expect to be called as expert witnesses to preserve the memory of each berry and twig. John Bradford is certainly not one of these artists, and in fact he even bluntly denounces nature as sacrilegious.

Bradford once enjoyed Rembrandt’s “philo-Semitism” and “severe” chiaroscuro (depicting depth in art via value, or shading), which “was the best way to eliminate nature and focus on the narrative.” But he later decided that Rembrandt’s solution “was as dualistically Christian as others, in that he used light as a metaphor for goodness filling a demonic darkness. In the Beginning, G-d did separate the light from the dark, but I don’t remember Him voicing an opinion about which was good and which was bad.“

This sort of ambiguity as to what is good and what is bad is a typically postmodern inquiry, and it exposes itself to one of the popular indictments of postmodernism: It is arbitrary. When one concerns oneself with unpacking language for purposes of laying bare its assumptions and exposing its inability to truly communicate, one must use some means of communication to convince others that communication is suspect.

Why, the critic of postmodernism often asks, do some words and ideas (namely postmodernism) get to survive the onslaught on language, while others (classicism, truth, justice, etc.) are unfairly targeted? There really is no good answer to this question (in part because the postmodernist would deconstruct “good” and “answer”), but there does not really have to be one.

Bradford’s art is a great example why this is so. In his paintings, which hung recently at the Mercer Gallery in New York, Bradford depicts Biblical scenes as if he were directing a film, with a keen eye for set design. Many of the works contain foliage of some sort, whether they populate interior or outside scenes. And here is where the arbitrary kicks in: There is no reason to assume that Moses stood outside as he cast his staff to the ground, so that it might become a serpent. Even the recent animated Prince of Egypt had the good sense to depict the scene inside Pharaoh’s palace, surrounded by guards, magicians and slaves. Exodus 7: 10-13 remains ambiguous on the matter, though the verse does suggest the two went “in” (the Hebrew is aleph-lamed) to Pharaoh, according to some translations. But Bradford’s “Moses before Pharaoh” occurs outside, surrounded by trees and dirt.

John Bradford, “Moses before Pharaoh.”

The decision to infuse the scene with trees is at once arbitrary and meaningful. Trees in the Bible symbolize a number of things from life (“a tree of life – ‘etz chaim’ - it is for those who grasp it”) to might (Song of Songs, 7:7) to knowledge of good and evil (as in Eden). The field is a chaotic place where Esau lives his violent life, while Jacob studies in his tent. But fields also served as loci of meditation for many prophets like Moses and David, who were shepherds in their pre-prophetic days. By placing Moses’ anti-natural act of turning a staff into a snake (the Bible’s blend of nanotechnology or alchemy) in a natural context (trees), Bradford reveals new aspects of the narrative that are otherwise lost in most people’s conceptions of Biblical stories as containing characters without setting.

In fact, Bradford’s textual inquires reflect themselves in his art-making process. “I am an heir to the great American Abstract Expressionist movement in that the painting is process: I arrive at my composition as I paint,” he wrote in an email. “I paint the entire composition directly onto the canvas and keep re-attacking the entire surface over and over again until, as I said, the narrative gesture of the work feels appropriate to the format, and I stop.”

“Jacob Blessing His Sons” is another example of Bradford’s “attack” upon Biblical space, and another one that he resolves through nature. The viewer can barely make out a bed with a character lying upon it on the extreme left hand side of the canvas, as other “figures” surround Jacob. One red character may be kneeling on the floor – perhaps Simeon or Levi beseeching his father’s forgiveness for sacking Shechem and the ensuing genocide. Another red figure stands off in the distance in the top right corner of the canvas, perhaps representing a guard watching the scene, or the anti-social and alienated Joseph, who later brings his sons to say goodbye to Jacob alone, without his brothers around. The red figure stands in a green oasis of trees and life, amidst the larger environment of hot browns, reds and ochres of the Egyptian desert. In a room that has surely begun to smell of death, Bradford has drawn a large green plant (bottom right), and a window or doorway looking out to a garden full of life.

John Bradford, “Jacob Blessing His Sons.”

Bradford has often appeared in Richard McBee’s reviews in these pages for his Biblical paintings, but he may strike some as an unlikely guest in a column on Jewish arts, as he is not Jewish. Surely, non-Jews paint Jewishly all the time (think Hiram and company building the Temple), but Bradford’s connection to Judaism and Jewish art is somewhat deeper than most. “I believe Judaism is an authentic religion,” he said through email. “My work celebrates the Hebraic Biblical ethos at the heart of our American heritage.” He considers the modern era “a consequence of a perspective unique to Judaism” that “nature is disenchanted and that man struggles creatively within nature to build a system of Justice, which was the single positive commandment given to Noah.”

To Bradford, modern painting, so appealing for its bible-like “language of reduction and discontinuity,” shares an “anti-naturalistic perspective” with the Bible. “The Bible concerns itself with distinctions, separations, and boundaries. So does a good painting,” he wrote in an artist statement, which at times recalls Rabbi Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s conceptions in Halakhic Man, “I used to believe that it was uncanny how the conventions of Biblical narration so perfectly captured the vicissitudes and quirks of reality. Now I see it is quite the other way around.”

In a May 7 review of Bradford’s Mercer 55 show in The Village Voice, R.C. Baker wrote: “These 14 Biblical scenes, painted with a drippy, Abstract Expressionist brio, are devoid of both fundamentalist didacticism and secular snarkiness, while beautifully evoking the imperfect humanity underlying the divine.” Baker is quite right to point out that Bradford refrains from preaching, though over email he hardly holds back from voicing his opinions. “Of course I detest contemporary trends that blithely expropriate Biblical stories to expound on current events or to ridicule or demean Judaism,” he wrote, though he added, “but even in that case, it’s a free country.”

“Moses Strikes the Rock” might best represent Bradford’s methodology. In the work, Moses literally beats nature with his stick (thus Moses and Bradford and co-conspirators in the homicide), as water flows out toward the people. But the postmodernist in Bradford can hardly suffer the boundary between nature and man (there are no conspicuous women in the piece). The painting is a study in camouflage, as any predator trying to hunt the Jews would find the brown, black and white Jews indistinguishable from the trees and grass. For his part, Moses wears a light blue robe with an orange belt, which ought to distinguish him from the rest of the figures, but only serves to meld him with the flowing water. Just as Moses sins in his betrayal of the word of G-d by striking the stone, the environment has sinned, as the water (which literally is Moses in the piece) flows forth in response to the commandment of man, not G-d.

John Bradford, “Moses Strikes the Rock.”

“By using Modernist conventions to reduce the narrative to its essentials, I invite the viewer to encompass the issues of the story in very concrete forms while simultaneously opening the viewer to the dialectical spirit of Biblical interpretation,” Bradford says of his work, and that is precisely what mature, credible Biblical art ought to do.

Menachem Wecker is a painter, writer and editor based in Washington, D.C. He welcomes comments at mwecker@gmail.com.

John Bradford’s work will be part of a group show in September at the Synagogue of the Arts on White Street in New York; www.synagogueforthearts.org.

Many mistranslate the word “midbar” as desert, whereas the word really carries more of a connotation for wasteland or wilderness, perhaps deriving from the root dever for “plague” or davar for “word” or “thing.” Desert implies a physical location; it evokes cacti, sand and jackals, ablaze with reds, yellows and siennas, whereas wilderness suggests more of a literary construct or a mood of sorts.

The Makor Artists-in-Residence program at the 92 Street Y is currently engaging notions of wandering and journey. As a fellow in that program, I have had the opportunity to explore aspects of journey such as preparation and map making, memory and nostalgia, comfort and adventure. These are all affiliates of the word midbar, which suggests aimlessness and a psychological journey – perhaps an interior one – in addition to a physical one.

What can it mean to wander in an aesthetic wilderness? Can paint achieve an understanding of the Jews’ sojourn in the desert that attends to a deeper conception than simply literal depictions of scenes from the Book of Numbers?

The current exhibit at the Mercer Gallery showcases the paintings of Stanley Fein, Anthony Siani, Joel Silverstein, Simon Carr, John Bradford, Younghee Choi Martin, Richard McBee, and Jack Silberman, and it seeks an aesthetic exploration of the Biblical wanderings.

A study in siennas and umbers that evokes some of Paul Klee’s linear drawings, John Bradford’s “The Report of the Spies” appropriates a wall of the gallery space. The painting references Moses’ appointment of the 12 spies sent to scout out Canaan and to generate an appropriate military strategy by which to conquer it. The plan goes amuck when the spies choose instead to use their positions to advance fear platforms that paralyze the people and send the multitude packing back into the wilderness for another 40 years. All the spies are punished, save Joshua and Caleb, who try to steer the people back towards G-d. The story of the spies is ripe with potential images for literal reference. It contains images of hope, strategy and strength, but also of fear, melancholy and punishment.

Bradford tackles the story by painting a three part narrative. On the left, the Moses figure stands steadfast with his staff in his right hand. Flanking him on his left, another figure beckons towards him, perhaps to reassure him, perhaps to restrain him. Moses looks towards the upper right corner of the painting, where two spies carry one of the huge fruits of the land. In the bottom right corner, a struggle emerges. Bradford writes of “two prognostications for military success… presented to Moses; one confident, one defeatist.” The spies inspire chaos amongst the people, and they concede the battle even before it has begun. When Moses apprehends them, many decide to attack the Canaanites without G-d’s permission, with further devastating results. Bradford manages to attend to both sides of this duality: the struggle and the violence on the one hand, and the resignation and fear on the other.

The painting is largely successful though, because the artist renders only the figures’ outlines. This allows the figures to “read” as structures of paint and not simply as naturalistic characters, but it also bares the characters’ innards. The viewer literally looks inside Moses and the spies. Bradford offers no answers of what they are thinking and what inspires their decisions, but he does force the viewer into that space, which necessarily raises many questions of motive and of self-meditation.

If Bradford’s painting explores intent and two conflicting responses to trauma and conflict, Richard McBee’s “The Sin Of The Golden Calf” interrogates notions of context. Those readers who read this column regularly might be interested to learn that McBee paints scenes other than the binding and sacrifice of Isaac, and I can vouch for the authenticity of this image even though it is not an akeida scene. McBee has written for this column since May 2000, and frankly, it is about time that he ends up on the opposite side of the review.

McBee’s “The Sin of the Golden Calf” shows Moses on the verge of smashing the tablets as the people frolic below about the golden calf. In McBee’s words, “danced arms akimbo and wailed, drunk and out of control, delirious at returning to a familiar idol.” The image has a bit of King Midas in it: golds, bronzes, ochres and browns dominate the pictorial space, with an occasional spattering of whites and greens. McBee seems to have learnt something from Poussin’s and di Raffaello’s golden calves, though he opts for a more abstract idol and a much smaller, younger calf to the other painters’ hefty cows. McBee employs several visual puns in his work like the fence surrounding the mountain, perhaps referencing the commandment, “Make a fence unto the Torah.” The verse speaks of a demarcated boundary that prevented the Jews from ascending Mount Sinai, but McBee manages a white picket fence (lending it an unexpected purple tinge at times), which manages to plant the Biblical scene in a more modern context.

Waiting obediently midway up the mountain for his master, the character of Joshua wears contemporary garb – a dress shirt and brown trousers – and further lends the painting a more modern and immediate oomph. McBee’s work often collapses the time gap and the culture clash between the modern viewer and the Biblical story by modernizing clothing and other iconography.

But there is something much deeper at play in McBee’s painting. I had the privilege of hearing painter Ahmed Abdalla address a class I attended at Massachusetts College of Art, where he spoke of trying to attain “a specific type of vagueness” in his work. He distinguished between that notion and the converse, a vague type of specificity. When a painter seeks to navigate an abstract space like Ahmed and McBee do, the painter must interpret an ambiguous visual field confidently and honestly.

When painting from life, the painter’s job is clearly defined: thou shalt be wholly obedient and faithful in thy efforts to capture nature. Mimesis – or copying – produces an exact replication of the object. But when naturalistic imagery dissolves into forms and colors and lines, the painter must find a new language. As the Genesis story speaks of G-d forging order within the chaos, the painter must maintain an internal logic even within the expressionistic form. Once the vocabulary is specific and clear, the painter can tackle vagueness as a subject, but never as a medium.

Thus McBee paints Moses standing atop the mountain not simply because the play casts a Moses character there, but also because the painting dictates a large white form to construct a triangle with the white form in the clouds in the right corner and with the dancing white forms along the middle of the bottom edge of the painting.

McBee thus literally paints his way through the wilderness. Just as the Jews had a choice of finding G-d in the wilderness, of finding meaning in the manna and the Temple and the commandments, McBee opts to find a structure in the forms of paint. He builds a chaotic wilderness, but the viewer, even as he or she sees the confusion, is always aware of the artist’s hand balancing the forms. He thus avoids the same pitfall upon which the generation of the spies and of the Golden Calf worshippers stumbled: a lack of awareness of underlying meaning.

Too many painters use abstraction as an excuse to cover poor compositional meditation. They get lost in the trajectory of the brushstrokes, the dazzling effect of the colors. They then set themselves “tired, and exhausted and not G-d fearers,” just like the generation of the wilderness.

McBee’s work and John Bradford’s work thus raises the question, is the painter really a G-d fearer? That is to say, has the painter who wishes to capture the moment of midbar really internalized the message of surface tension and superficial chaos, while still realizing that there is a Divine hand that dictates order beneath? If the answer is yes, then the painting has faithfully captured the portrait of the midbar.

Menachem Wecker edits the Arts and Culture Section of the Yeshiva University Commentator. As an artist, he has trained at the Massachusetts College of Art. Menachem may be contacted at: mwecker@gmail.com.

Authority, as the Gemara in Sanhedrin says, makes the world go round. Whether exercised as external power in governmental brute force or through the more subtle influences of religious or moral beliefs on our mental architecture, it is the defining element that allows us to function peacefully as social beings and even allows many of the niceties of civilization.

In the Jewish world, authority finds its source in none other than G-d Himself and the agency that we have internalized as Halacha. We have one source of authority and attempt to act within its confines as much as humanly possible. The issue of authority, specifically, the structure of our lives that defines the borders between personal conduct and socially legitimate behavior, must be mapped in order to be recognized. This relationship, according to Rabbi Dr. Avi Berkowitz, is precisely the issue that John Bradford’s current paintings address at the exhibition at 55 Mercer Gallery.

Berkowitz is no stranger to the concepts of both civil and religious authority. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University with a specialty in Middle East Studies. As amusmach of Rabbi Aaron Soloveitchik, his rabbinic authority is solid. He teaches World Jewish History at the Ramaz Upper School and is the rabbi of the Community Synagogue located at East Sixth Street in Manhattan. Rabbi Dr. Berkowitz teaches a weekly Chumash class at his synagogue on Wednesday nights to, among others, his friend of at least 20 years – John Bradford. In light of that class and many years of artistic and scholarly interchange, Berkowitz feels that Bradford is an astute student of Torah and has “integrated the Jewish spirit of the narrative with its halachic dimension.” Berkowitz see evidence of this in one especially grisly painting in the exhibition, Phinehas (2003).

Pinchas is shown in the lower foreground center spearing the sinners Zimri and Cozbi on the left (Bamidbar 25: 7) as witnesses on the right look on in awe. The zealot Pinchas is seen as a complete figure, free, and empowered to act. It is depicted exactly as described by the Gemara in Sanhedrin, 82b. Commenting on this event, the Gemara explicates the Mishnah that states, “If one cohabits with a heathen woman, he is punished by zealots.” R. Dimi comments that the transgressor would be guilty of violating the prohibitions against niddah, a non-Jewish maidservant, a non-Jewish woman and a married woman. But once Zimri perpetrated this forbidden act as a revolt against the leadership of Moses, our teacher inexplicably forgot thehalacha. At that moment Pinchas, shocked to see what was happening, remembered the law, whereupon Moses replied to him, “He who reads the letter, let him be the agent [to carry out its instructions].” The Gemara is explicit concerning the execution of the Halacha; thetransgressors must be punished while in the act of their transgression. Any other manner or time would have transformed the righteous Pinchas into a common murderer.

According to Berkowitz, Bradford’s painting depicts, “Pinchas acting with the freedom of modern man and yet, the entire painting confines him within the structures of the law. The very specific nature of the visual depiction tells us he is acting only within the confines of Halacha. The Gemara is expressing the right and power of an individual to act, but only within the exact specifics of the Halacha. To deviate in any manner makes one liable to the death penalty. Itmust be executed at the precise moment, and that is what Bradford has captured.” Berkowitz adds that these laws do not apply in our times when even a beit din lacks the authority to execute transgressors.

Bradford’s painting asserts that the self-authorizing individual can only exist within in the strict confines of Halacha. All of the Avot possessed this unique individualistic power. In Berkowitz’s analysis, this pivotal painting is starkly contrasted with three other paintings inthe exhibition that address further issues of authority.

Moses and Pharaoh (2003) is a distillation of the notion of “Despotism Confronted.” Exodus 10:25 -11:8, depicts the final encounter between Moses and Pharaoh in which Moses declares “I will never see your face again,” as “he left “Pharaoh’s presence in a burning anger.” Berkowitz sees “Pharaoh’s figure, outlined in yellow on the left, as a tightly bound despot, wrapped up and more and more constricted by the very institutions he created to crush society.” In contrast Moses is “about to become empowered and is on the verge of acting with freedom. His hand rises and is about to unfurl” as he departs. We see him in a faint after-image on the extreme right exiting the palace. Most importantly, Moses is seen in a transitionbetween being bound to Pharaoh’s authority and freely submitting to G-d’s authority. Seen in this light, Moshe is “still operating on the basis of direct instructions from G-d. He is Moshe Rabbainu in training. He is not yet the Moshe who will [on his own initiative] smash the Tablets. After that he becomes, in effect, a self-authorizing individual. Then, but only then, does he earn the right to ask to “see G-d’s face.”

Despotism is illegitimate governmental authority. Judaism challenged the pagan Pharaoh’s authoritarianism with the creation of the Jewish monarchy, as exemplified by the reign of Solomon. The Judgment of Solomon (2003) encapsulates the “Rise of Legitimate Authority.” Berkowitz describes Solomon’s hand “as fully extended in a manner that echoes the assertive posture of Pinchas. But Pinchas is placed in the lower half of the painting, acting only as an individual. Here, Solomon, towering over the figures of the supplicant women, is acting as a legitimate authority. He is totally liberated, reflecting legitimate authority in its flowering because Solomon is dealing with yichus - lineage - the most significant matter in Jewish life. Pinchas judges mere life and death, whereas lineage defines one’s identity. Pinchas cannot arbitrate such matters since he has no meaningful lineage.” Pinchas is the only grandson of Aaron, who is not a Kohen. This was the case since he had already been born when G-d decreed the Priesthood to be given to the sons of Aaron and his grandsons who were not yet born. The distinction between the individual, like Pinchas, who acts on his own, no matter how righteously, and the ruler who can judge lineage, as in the Judgment of Solomon, son of David, is crucial to the establishment of legitimacy. The right to secular authority within a Jewish context must arise out of a discernible past, a lineage of justice and halachic-bound power.

The contemporary world is provocatively depicted in the painting directly across from Solomon. George Bush at Ground Zero (2003) represents, according to Berkowitz, “Bush’s task to free himself from the albatross of his own lineage, specifically his father’s anti-Israel legacy. Only then, can his authority [to transform the American political reality emerging from the 9/11 catastrophe] be legitimated. His outstretched arm echoes Solomon’s commandinggesture and yet his face is hidden because he is still not fully liberated from his family’s history. He must avoid the “Pinchas trap” that is implicit in the Western illusion of the self-covenanting individual. He must realize that his job is more than just arbitrating the life and death of the terrorists. Therefore, Bradford depicts Bush in the center of the painting, implying that Bush must choose whether he wants to rise to the level of Solomon or descend to the level of Pinchas. In other words, will Bush become a Solomon-like figure, a fully legitimate authority commanding world affairs, or will he remain a self-covenanting individual, acting heroically, but ultimately leaving no legacy.”

Berkowitz’s analysis has come full circle, linking the righteous, but limited and individual, act of Pinchas with the struggles of our current President to act forcefully against the evil of Islamic terror. Exercising authority in the international arena demands a recognized legitimacy. Considering the chorus of criticism, just doing the right thing is not sufficient. Legitimacy ultimately flows from G-d and a thoroughly righteous relationship with His people, the Jews, and His Nation, Israel. Part political analysis and part prophecy, Bradford’s painting has depicted “Authority Being Created.”

John Bradford and Avi Berkowitz comprise a curious couple. Bradford’s paintings blossom under Berkowitz’s trained eye as he traces a narrative of authority; originating in the narrow confines of the righteous individual, evolving in the maturation of Moses as communal leader and blossoming in the glory of Solomon’s national political leadership. The metaphorical climax of the paintings is reached at Ground Zero, the intersection of national tragedy and international crisis. This confluence of Torah, interpretation, halacha, politics and Jewish art alters everything it touches from Tanach to today’s headlines, leaving a permanent and disturbing impression on our consciousness.

Rabbi Dr. Avi Berkowitz’s comments were recorded at a gallery interview while viewing the paintings. I am grateful for his participation.

Richard McBee is a painter of Torah subject matter and writer on Jewish Art. Please feel free to contact him with comments at www.richardmcbee.com.